


Anchor and Moor

by Linden



Series: Sail and Mast [1]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Curtain Fic, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-20
Updated: 2015-01-20
Packaged: 2018-03-08 07:10:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,213
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3200159
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Linden/pseuds/Linden
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They ended up in Ithaca, New York.</p><p>Yeah. Dean wasn't quite certain how that happened, either.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into 中文 available: [Anchor and Moor/锚沉荒野](https://archiveofourown.org/works/6266077) by [Milfoil_c](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Milfoil_c/pseuds/Milfoil_c)



> This is sort of a prequel to my _With the Winter Trees and Stars_ , I guess? I needed some cuddly, mostly angst-free Winchester boys in my life this week. Not sure whether the whole vignette format works; all feedback, as always, is so very much appreciated. I love comments like Dean loves pie.
> 
> Titles of both this fic and its series are hijacked from the Wailin’ Jennys’ _Asleep at Last_ , which is pretty much my favorite love song in the world.

They ended up in Ithaca, New York.

Dean was pretty sure that given a choice, and the time to think about it, upstate New York would probably not have been where he’d have chosen to settle down, if he’d known that he and Sam were in the process of settling. He’d never much liked winter anyway, as seasons went, and winters up here were not only windy and snowy and bitter but freakin’ _long_ —a fact which was, he felt, an important one to keep in mind, and so in years to come, from roughly October to March, he would remind his little brother of it at least twice a week (usually, for optimal effect, while shivering), and then whine about it until Sam gave in and got up from whatever he was doing to go make Dean a pot of hot chocolate, or else, even better, tumble him into their big warm bed and keep him there until they were both sweaty and flushed and spent.

Even Ithacan winters were tolerable, when they involved naked Sams and eiderdown.

But Dean had known none of that yet in February of 2022, when he’d blown into New York only half a step ahead of yet another armageddon, Sammy golden-eyed beside him. That February Dean knew only that the latest Winchester apocalyptic adventure had damn near gone belly-up in an otherwise innocuous-looking church in Tompkins County, and that though he and his baby brother had figured it out like they always did, had gotten the job done and held the goddamned world together (one more deal, clean and iron-clad; one more deal to pay for all), Sammy had been in the ICU for a week before he’d come around, and in a step-down unit for two more, and by the time he’d insisted on checking himself out of the regular ward fifteen days later, over the vociferous objections of what seemed like every doctor at Cayuga Medical Center and a few visiting from out of state, Dean didn’t see the sense in putting him on the road for thirteen hundred miles just to get back to Lebanon. His little brother was quietly panicked and bone-thin and utterly exhausted—broken ribs still healing, brain still rattled, powers still inclined to wake without warning (and man, had that been a bitch to manage in public)—and it’s not as though there were anything really waiting for them in Kansas anymore, anyway: the bunker was full of memories now that were never going to help him heal.

Dean checked them in to a motel just off of 13 instead, with a fridge and a hotplate and a manager who seemed utterly unconcerned about renting a room by the week to a man who threatened violence if housekeeping so much as knocked at their door.  The panic loosened its grip as soon as Sam knew he was tucked up behind salt lines and iron with no one but Dean, and once it did he slept for days, eighteen hours at a stretch, awake for only maybe one or two between them—just long enough for Dean to pour protein down his throat and coax him to eat a little, for the two of them to talk, haltingly, Dean helping him fill in some of the gaps in his memory, though he was never gonna tell Sam everything. The kid didn’t need it, not after everything he’d given up for this, everything he’d done. 

The days rolled on, snowy and cold. Sometimes Dean read, during the long hours Sam was sleeping; sometimes he caught a game on TV; every few days he went out for food. But most of the time, almost all of the time, he curled up around his little brother in their borrowed bed and lay drifting, dozing, with the TV a comforting hum in the background, and one of Sam’s bruised, bony hands clutching at his own as though it were the last thing keeping him grounded to the earth.

For a long while Dean wasn’t certain that it would be enough.

He would have prayed, had there been anyone left to pray to.

***

It was early April when he opened his eyes one morning to find Sam already awake, sitting up beside him in their warm, messy bed, stroking gentle, gentle fingers through his hair.  His baby brother was still painfully thin, and his eyes were still bloodshot and tired, but for the first time since the goddamned ground had split open in a field thirty miles north of here, his baby brother looked like _Sam_.

Sam tugged, very gently. ‘When was the last time you cut this, mountain man, huh?’

It took Dean a moment to find his voice. ‘Like you’re one to talk.’

Sam smiled. He looked over at their tiny counter, with its tiny hotplate and tiny fridge beneath. ‘I think I’m hungry,’ he said, quietly, and Dean’s throat closed up against sudden, grateful tears.

***

A week before Sam’s thirty-ninth birthday, Dean moved them into an apartment on the second floor of an old house in Ithaca. Sammy could handle stairs by then, though he had to take them slowly, and though the place was small and only simply furnished, it was quiet and it was bright, and the month-to-month lease Dean had agreed to for it was cheaper than staying on at the motel.  (Also, he was really fucking tired of scrambling eggs on a hotplate.) He went out and bought a yoga mat and some free weights later that afternoon, stopped at one of the secondhand shops in town and found a treadmill that didn’t look too close to dying, set everything up in the living room for his brother, and tried not to hover.

The telekinesis started fading, along with the crippling headaches, and by Memorial Day it had been two weeks since Dean had last seen gold in his brother’s eyes.  Sam complained about now having to get up to get the remote in the evenings.

He met Daniel, a grad student who lived down the street and ran about the same time every day that Dean did; sometimes they ran together, not talking much, just enjoying the steady rhythm of their feet on the pavement and the whoosh of the cars going by. There was a dog that ran with them sometimes, a collared brown Lab who made Sam smile the evenings he followed Dean all the way back to the house.

He met Nan, who owned an auto shop that did a brisk business taking care of cars about town but specialized in classics, and he had a job approximately thirty-two seconds after she took a look under the Impala’s hood.

He met their neighbors, one evening when he went out the back door to investigate a terrific bang and found a lawn mower smoking sadly on the other side of the fence, and a slim woman in her seventies cursing at it inventively. Dean was never entirely clear on how that had ended up with him and Sam being invited to dinner in her backyard, but the steaks were delicious and the beers were cold, and Dean liked both Erin and her older sister, a retired economics professor from Cornell. After dinner Maeve and Sam sat talking comfortably about whatever it was really smart people talked about while Erin fixed the lawn mower in the shed, and Dean sat comfortably on the floor and handed her things. 

When she popped the cap off another beer with her wedding ring, he might have fallen just a little bit in love.

*** 

Sam was strong enough to start going out on his own for a little while each day by the beginning of June—a short trip to the store, or to the library, or to bring Dean lunch at the garage—and by the end of it he had finally started putting on some real weight again, though he was still slimmer and lighter than he’d been in years. Sometimes, in the mornings, when he was in his boxers with a hoodie pulled on carelessly against the early chill, and Dean was lazing in bed and watching him putter around the kitchen, Dean could almost see the lanky, lovely teenage brother he remembered—slender as a boy, all soft scarred skin and slim muscle and bone.

He wondered sometimes what it would be like to love someone whose face he hadn’t known at seven, at twelve, at seventeen; when he didn’t carry in his heart the memory of its every changing curve or angle, from an infant’s to a man’s. 

Odd, he imagined, and sat up to take both the coffee and the sleepy morning kiss Sam brought him.

***

July tumbled in with fireworks and a parade, and the way that light from sparklers caught in Sammy’s eyes. They started going to the Lincoln Street Diner for burgers on Tuesday evenings and breakfast on Saturdays, and soon enough the waiters knew their names and remembered how they took their coffee, and by the end of the month the cooks smiled and waved when they saw either one of them out and about in town. Nan introduced them to Andrew, who owned a bookshop Sam started heading to on the afternoons he felt up to the half-mile walk, and to Nell, who started cheerfully hassling Dean to join the fire department as a volunteer.  (‘We can always use good men, Dean. Pretty ones are just a bonus!’) And one day in late August, as the town was preparing for the influx of college students to return, and Dean was walking back to their apartment from work in the warm evening light, he looked around and realized that they’d started to put down roots here, sometime when he hadn’t quite been looking.

Sam was making coffee in the kitchen when he got upstairs, barefoot in his secondhand jeans and a soft, soft tee, safe and whole and healing. 

It took Dean a long moment to recognize the feeling in his chest as peace.


	2. Chapter 2

They went back to the bunker, once, in mid-September, when Sam felt up for the drive and Dean was itching a little anyway for the road. The place hadn’t felt like home to Dean in years, not since Kevin had died inside of it and he’d hunted Sammy through its halls; it was just a place he’d stayed for awhile, now, just a place he’d slept in, and for Sam, he knew, it had never been anything but, no matter how desperately Dean had once wanted otherwise.

They cleaned up, quietly—the breakfast dishes Dean had been doing nine months ago when Cas had blown in were still in the sink where he’d left them, and Sam’s coffee cup was still sitting empty in the library, beside three open books and their father’s journal—and then they packed up their clothes and their boots and some of the particularly nice cast iron pans Dean had been missing in the kitchen, and Sam’s books, and Dean’s records, and two of the really excellent boot-knives in the arsenal, and a box of silver bullets and enchanted wrought-iron shells apiece. Sam took their few photographs and tucked them into the glove box of the car, and Dean stowed a crate of old Macallan Scotch in the back seat, and then they loaded everything else into the trunk, bitching at each other as always about where things went and how they should fit and how in the hell did you ever even pass geometry, Dean, oh wait you _didn’t_.

Dean wondered, sometimes, if he were ever gonna outgrow the impulse to tackle his little brother to the ground and rub his face in the grass when the kid was being a little bitch. 

If so, it clearly hadn’t happened yet.

Later, after scuffling had turned into wrestling had turned into kissing had turned into Dean blowing Sam and then fucking him slow and easy on the hood, Dean tipped him into the passenger seat flushed and sleepy and content, stowed everything in the trunk _properly_ , and then went back inside to shut out the lights and finish up.

He checked his room and Sam’s to be sure they hadn’t missed anything, grabbed his spare strop that he’d forgotten in the bathroom cabinet, and put the dishes away in the kitchen cupboards, from where they’d dried as he and Sam had worked. Shelved the few library books still sitting on the table, stood for a long moment looking down at their father’s journal. He stroked his hand over the cover, the leather worn and smooth beneath his fingers, the last tangible link he had to John, to the life he’d lived with him from the age of four to twenty-seven.

It had been thirty-nine years since the fire that had killed their mother, seventeen since the one that had killed Sammy’s Jess and put the two of them on the road together toward Colorado. They’d saved people. They’d hunted things. They’d carried on the family business.

Dean was, at long last, pretty sure they deserved a rest.

He left the journal where it was, turned the last of the lights out behind him at the door, and went outside to Sam.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [One Foot Up and One Foot Down](https://archiveofourown.org/works/3324116) by [SamGirlDeanCurious](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SamGirlDeanCurious/pseuds/SamGirlDeanCurious)




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